In The Book of Blood and Shadow, we follow Nora (hehe), a smart senior/Latin nerd at a prep school, and her three best friends. They land spots in a special study class to try to interpret a book that no one has been able to in the 400-some years since it was written. It turns out that an organization is keeping and eye on everyone who shows interest in the book, and once they start to make progress things start…
Magic is failing in The Autumnlands so Gharta creates a spell to bring the Great Champion to their world so he can restore their magic. They weren’t able to give the spell enough power so it took from the city’s reserves, thus causing it to fall from the sky. Many died, and an attack from Seven-Scars and his bison tribe cause even more destruction. Learoyd, the Great Champion, was successfully brought into the Autumnlands and helps save the city from…
I finished this book late one evening and went to bed soon after. As I laid in bed I digested the book and realized that I liked it so much because it made me feel happy. It also gave me the itch to travel, but if you must know one thing about the book, know that it made me happy. In The Winemakers, the reader is fed little bits of information along the way. This can either be done well…
On February 9th, 2016, the final book in the Red Rising Trilogy was released. This was a big deal. I read Red Rising last fall and really liked it. Then I read Golden Son and that book shifted something inside of me; it is a book that really means something important. So as you can guess, I had high hopes for Morning Star. It’s not at all like it was a bad book. It just didn’t get exponentially better in…
(source) Oh god I was so happy when this story was over. Dark Witch is the worst Nora Roberts book I have ever read; I didn’t even know she could write them this horribly. And the narrator, the narrator! What a grating voice in all of its forms. She sounds like an enthusiastic theater student on the verge of an orgasm. The bones of the story itself were good: an American woman moves to Ireland to meet her cousins. It…
John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography is an extremely comprehensive, yet not intimidating, guide to how to best use your camera, especially with nature photography. It walks you through how to properly set up your camera, managing exposure, many different types of lenses, manual exposure, composition, and much more. Shaw presents this information in a very interesting and approachable way, unlike many photography books that tend to go on and on and lose you in the process. If you’re looking…
(source) Wolfsangel is a haunting fictional story based on the real-life tragedy of the WWII massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane. It was slightly slow-going in the beginning (due to setting up and getting to know everyone) but by the time I was halfway through the book I couldn’t put it down and read obsessively until it was finished. This book is set in a tiny French town that is being occupied by Germans, and by reading this book we learn to love…
The Little French Guesthouse is about a couple, Emmy and Nathan, who take a vacation together to a small town in France. After a series of events, they break up and Emmy ends up spending the remainder of their vacation at the B&B where they had rented a room, making fast friends with their host, Rupert. Much of the beginning of this book is unpleasant. It’s all about the nasty bits of their breakup and I found myself speed reading…
(source) Planetfall is…an interesting book. I was hooked early on with the unique setting: men and women from earth have inhabited another planet for about 20 years and they have a “zero footprint” way of living. Everything is recycled and their houses are actually living things. There’s a turn when the son of a lost founding member shows up at their colony. The story changes completely from there. One thing that was kind of aggravating but kept me reading is…
(source) French Illusions and From Tours to Paris are both interesting books. They follow the 8 months that Linda spent in the Loire Valley and Paris as an au pair, student, and girlfriend. Everything is very detailed, written in present tense, and we often get the story minute-by-minute. These books don’t read like real-life; everyone in them uses perfect, un-conjugated grammar and always seems to say either the perfectly right or perfectly wrong thing. It was very distracting while reading…